The New York Times > Movies > Can Disney Build a Better Mickey Mouse? 4/23/04 7:11 AM April 18, 2004 Can Disney Build a Better Mickey Mouse? By JESSE GREEN E was the only time I was happy," said Maurice Sendak. Mr. Sendak, who based the character of Max in his children's book "Where the Wild Things Are" on Mickey Mouse, is an exact contemporary of the cartoon rodent: both were born in 1928. "I was around 6 when I first saw him," he said. "It filled me with joy. I think it was those primary colors so vivid and pure, taken up with the most incredibly beautiful animation, reminding you of Fred Astaire. Oh! And his character was the kind I wished I'd had as a child: brave and sassy and nasty and crooked and thinking of ways to outdo people." The joy leached from Mr. Sendak's voice. "Not like the lifeless fat pig he is now." Mr. Sendak is hardly alone in mourning the mouse's decline. "Boring," "embalmed," "neglected," "irrelevant," "deracinated" and, perhaps most damning, "over" are some of the adjectives that cropped up in recent interviews with people in the cartoon, movie and marketing businesses. And strangely for such a well-known figure, Mickey doesn't even have a back story: no clearly defined relations, no hometown, no goals, no weaknesses. According to David Smith, director of the Disney archives, the company maintains no "biography" of the character; he is who he is. But Mickey is not just another property that Disney owns: he's the hallmark, the frontman, the ambassador for its theme parks, the logo on its business cards. A significant portion of the Disney empire is built around this strange creature. And yet, at a time when the company is already facing an almost cartoonishly daunting litany of travails — a hostile takeover bid, the loss of its highly successful partnership with the animation studio Pixar, mass layoffs at its own animation studio, the very public campaign by Roy E. Disney, nephew of Walt, to dethrone the C.E.O., Michael Eisner — his appeal is apparently starting to slip. Publicly, the company maintains an optimistic stance. "In my world," said Andy Mooney, chairman of the consumer products division, "a character that generates $4.5 billion a year in retail revenue and is at least four times larger than any other character in the world except Winnie the Pooh" — which Disney also controls — "doesn't need refurbishing." According to Mr. Mooney, Mickey has "98 percent unaided awareness for children 3 to 11 worldwide," and has started to appear again as a "real favorite" among girls 8 to 12 and, surprisingly, boys 13 to 17. The company acknowledges that revenue from Mickey merchandise, measured as a portion of all consumer products, has shrunk significantly since 1997. What Disney doesn't acknowledge is that Mickey's reputation, measured in conversations with industry watchers, is shrinking even more. Still, signals of the Mouse's distress have lately begun to seep out, almost unconsciously, from the soul of Disney's business: its storytelling. In a video game called "Kingdom Hearts" — which has sold more than 4 million units since its release in 2002 and is frequently cited as evidence of Mickey's continuing relevance — the mouse barely appears. Instead, he is relegated to a subplot that seems eerily allegorical. According to the game's Web site, evil marauding aliens known as the Heartless are threatening the Kingdom. (Roy Disney has called the company under Mr. Eisner's http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/movies/18GREE.html?ei=1&en=9c1e53d8ef255a11&ex=1083231156&pagewanted=print&position= Page 1 of 5 The New York Times > Movies > Can Disney Build a Better Mickey Mouse? 4/23/04 7:11 AM leadership rapacious and soulless.) "There's turmoil in Disney Castle," it says. "King Mickey is missing." The company has indeed made quiet attempts to find him. In 2002, Disney marketing officials set up a Mickey "situation room," stocked floor to ceiling with thousands of examples of mouse merchandise, to show executives from every division, brought in for tours, that the character was inconsistent and in need of refocusing. (Licensees were somewhat randomly producing four different generations of Mickey likenesses.) At around the same time, said a branding executive who did not wish to risk reprisals by allowing his name to be used, Disney "put out feelers" among animators for ideas about remaking the Mouse. Disney officials deny it, saying that the 18-month program of special events and new product releases that commenced on his 75th birthday, last November, was not an attempt to revive a flagging brand but merely a company-wide effort at "showcasing" Mickey more successfully. But it is not immediately clear how the 75 giant Mickey statues they gave celebrities to decorate might do that. "Companies at times let a character linger because they are not sure what to do with it and fear going the wrong way," said Avi Arad, CEO of Marvel, which has revived its classic Spiderman character. "So they do nothing. Mickey right now doesn't have a dialogue. He's not carrying any banners. Maybe right now he doesn't stand for anything but nostalgia. Nostalgia is fine, but it is not enough." Whose nostalgia it is makes a crucial difference. Some marketers said that these days, Mickey merchandise is mostly bought by parents — an ominous sign. Martin Brochstein, executive editor of the Licensing Letter, calls Mickey "irrelevant to a huge generational chunk that grew up on `Sesame Street' or Nickelodeon but really had no contact with Mickey unless they went to one of the theme parks." According to Cindy Levitt, vice president of Hot Topic, a mall-based fashion retailer, kids themselves are buying clothing featuring SpongeBob and, of all things, the Care Bears. To be popular with today's hipster teens and 20-somethings, she said, a character "has to have originated in their youth. It has to be from the 1980's." Mickey, she added, doesn't "register" with her clients. "He's too old. He's their parents' character." So how did Mickey come to be seen by so many people as an out-of-touch Rat Pack leftover, cashiered to Anaheim and Orlando, all but playing golf with Gerald Ford? How can something so beloved become so empty? And what can Disney do about it? "It all began with a mouse," Walt Disney liked to say. Well, not quite. In 1928, Disney lost control of the rights to a previous creation called Oswald the Rabbit. All but bankrupt, he hastily sought to develop a new character that would be a distinct individual instead of a vaudeville stooge. Along with Ub Iwerks — the only animator who stayed with him — he replaced the rabbit's long floppy ears with two black disks and came up with one weird creature. Not just physically, though as mice go, he was pretty irregular, with his giant feet, widow's peak, plunger hands and hose-like limbs. More surprising was his personality; if it was based, as many people say, on Disney himself (he provided the voice), you've got to wonder about Walt. The original Mickey — who made his public debut in "Steamboat Willie," the first synchronized-sound cartoon — was only partly civilized: uninhibited, bare-chested, rough-and- ready to the point of sadism. His chums were farmyard animals like Claraballe Cow and Horace Horsecollar, and, like most cartoon characters of the period, he blithely trafficked in fistfights, drownings, dismemberments. For violence, the shipboard shenanigans of "Steamboat Willie" far exceed those in "Steamboat Bill Jr.," the Buster Keaton feature that inspired it. In one sequence, Mickey tortures various animals — banging cow teeth, tweaking pig nipples — in order to produce a rendition of "Turkey in the Straw." But that richly drawn, disreputable character, born of desperation and betrayal, got watered down almost from the moment he was introduced. Disney's first licensed merchandise — a Mickey Mouse writing tablet — appeared in 1929, by which point the first Mickey Mouse Club had already been established (along with its code http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/movies/18GREE.html?ei=1&en=9c1e53d8ef255a11&ex=1083231156&pagewanted=print&position= Page 2 of 5 The New York Times > Movies > Can Disney Build a Better Mickey Mouse? 4/23/04 7:11 AM of behavior). The cartoon, originally drawn for adults, was repositioned for the millions of children who took Mickey to heart. And although Mickey for a while remained a playful, conniving underdog, like Huck Finn or Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, he gradually got less mischievous. "He couldn't have any of the naughty qualities he had in his earlier cartoons," said Mr. Smith, of the Disney archives, "because so many people looked up to him. The studio would get complaints in the mail." So, sometime in the mid- to late 1930's, Mickey settled down. Barnyard cohorts and rail-riding adventures gave way to suburban domesticity with his non-wife Minnie ("They just lived together as friends," said Mr. Smith. "For a very long time") and their unexplained nephews. At the same time, Mickey's perverse qualities were grafted onto his new supporting cast — Donald Duck and Goofy, especially — who by the 1940's, according to Mr. Smith, eclipsed the mouse in popularity. Like Walt, whose politics started a rightward drift after a studio strike in 1941, Mickey was no longer a hungry Depression prole; by the time he started shilling war bonds, the transformation from amoral Huck Finn to virtuous, conservative Aunt Polly was complete.